---
id: "20260915-0202-do-the-kiel-matheson"
title: "Do the Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski (2009) and Pooley & Tupy (2020) resampling papers support the 61.2% and 54.2% win-rate figures attributed to them?"
type: "capture"
status: "promoted"
promoted_to: ["40-entities/entity-time-price.md (new concept hub — the load-bearing methodological fork between the two papers' figures)","30-notes/claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals.md (existing note — frontmatter source_2 block synced to Tier 1 / directly-read using this capture's fields; audit_status close-out line appended, 2026-09-15)","50-questions/question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries.md (addendum appended closing legs 1-2, narrowing to the still-open Sunstein leg; status stays open)"]
not_promoted: ["Claim: Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski (2009) supports 61.2% — duplicate. This exact claim, with the same Table 1 quote and Tier 1 sourcing, already lives in claim-three-resamplings-...md, corrected there today (2026-09-15) by a cross-model audit (claude-fable-5) that used THIS capture's independent read as convergent confirmation. Writing a second note would fork one claim across two files.","Claim: Pooley & Tupy (2020) does not support 54.2%-for-Ehrlich, it's Simon's win rate — duplicate. Same situation: the existing note's body and audit_status already state this exact correction, quoting the same sentence this capture quotes. Not re-promoted; the existing note's frontmatter source_2 block was stale (Tier 3, 'not independently read') relative to its own corrected body, so this promotion fixed that instead of forking a new file.","Claim: the 61.2%/54.2% figures differ in metric, span, and interval count, so aren't the same measurement — duplicate. Existing note's body already says this near-verbatim ('they differ in price construction, date span, interval count, and — decisively — in which man they favor'). No distinct angle beyond what's already there.","Further lead: Pooley & Tupy's war-clause-excluded 69.9% figure — the capture's own author explicitly judged this 'not independently notable enough to be a core claim here'; respecting that call, left in inbox as a lead for a future war-clause-methodology capture.","Further lead: McClintick & Emmett (2005) and Mark J. Perry (2008), the two prior analyses Kiel et al. say they contradict — neither read this or any session (capture: 'not read this session'); entity candidates for both declined at the promotion test for the same reason, plus thinness (see journal).","Further lead: Lawn (2010) critical response to Kiel et al. — not read this session, no claim to promote.","Further lead: Sunstein's uncredited 63% figure — genuinely unresolved, not this capture's job to chase further; already routed via question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries, addendum appended narrowing that question to this one leg.","Entity candidates Katherine A. Kiel, Victor A. Matheson, Kevin Golembiewski, Gale L. Pooley, Marian L. Tupy — declined for individual hub pages. Real people, real one-paper contribution each, but no claim-note in this promotion anchors to any of them individually, and house precedent in this exact cluster (Cass Sunstein — more prominent, cited across two existing claim-notes — still has no entity hub) sets the bar higher than 'co-authored the cited paper.' Bias against the flood; a hub is recoverable later if one of them recurs."]
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-09-15T00:00:00.000Z"
provenance: "batch run, 2026-09-15"
derived_from: []
verifies: "question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries"
tags: ["population-policy","forecasting","simon-ehrlich-wager","statistics","verification","resampling","unverified-quant-resolved"]
source_url: "https://hcapps.holycross.edu/hcs/RePEc/hcx/HC0908-Kiel-Matheson-Golembiewski_EhrlichSimon.pdf"
source_author: "Katherine A. Kiel, Victor A. Matheson, Kevin Golembiewski"
source_date: "2009-07-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_title: "Luck or Skill? An Examination of the Ehrlich - Simon Bet"
source_venue: "College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics, Faculty Research Series, Paper No. 09-08 (working paper hosted on the department's own institutional server; published as Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski, 'Luck or skill? An examination of the Ehrlich-Simon bet,' Ecological Economics 69(7), 2010, pp.1365-1367, Elsevier — paywalled, not independently accessed this session)"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "16cc0e583201f8571de0f00167832c6a31d5b21ff05bbecb6f3a4461e2b189b0"
source_quote: "Percentage of bets won by Ehrlich [10-year intervals] 61.2%"
(Table 1: "Results of the Ehrlich-Simon Bet - 1900-2007)"
source_url_2: "https://humanprogress.org/luck-or-insight-the-simon-ehrlich-bet-re-examined/"
source_author_2: "Gale L. Pooley, Marian L. Tupy"
source_date_2: "2020-08-25T00:00:00.000Z"
source_title_2: "Luck or Insight? The Simon-Ehrlich Bet Re-Examined"
source_venue_2: "Human Progress (a Cato Institute project; the piece is authored directly by Pooley and Tupy on their own project site, and states it 'was originally published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, and can be found in the Wiley Online Library' — the journal record is Pooley & Tupy, 'Luck or insight? The Simon-Ehrlich bet re-examined,' Economic Affairs 40(2), 2020, pp.277-280, Wiley — paywalled, not independently accessed this session)"
source_tier_2: 1
source_sha_2: "2cabc1cf5f3d8319f333c428314035adc3e23bbbf7d02752499383b76bb1363d"
source_quote_2: "When analysed with time prices, Simon wins the bet 54.2 per cent of the time."
seek_code_commit: "546fa57"
---


Both underlying papers were located and read directly this session — the Kiel,
Matheson & Golembiewski working paper via its own institutional PDF host
(`hcapps.holycross.edu`, TLS-verified), and the Pooley & Tupy piece via
Human Progress, the project both authors run and publish through directly
(cross-checked against an identical Gale Pooley Substack repost). This
resolves [[question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries]] — with
a correction, not a simple confirmation. The 61.2% figure checks out exactly
as attributed. The 54.2% figure is real but has been circulating in this
vault (and in the HumanProgress secondary-summary chain feeding
[[claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals]])
attached to the wrong side of the bet.

## Claim: Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski (2009) directly supports "Ehrlich would have won 61.2% of ten-year intervals, 1900-2007"

**Claim type**: quantitative. **Floor**: Tier 1-2 required — met (Tier 1, author's own institutional working-paper server, PDF read directly).
verifies: question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries

The paper's Table 1 ("Results of the Ehrlich-Simon Bet - 1900-2007") reports,
for 98 ten-year intervals: "Percentage of bets won by Ehrlich 61.2%" with an
"Average return on bet for Ehrlich" of 10.5%. (The same table also reports a
25-year-interval version: 59.0% of 83 intervals, average return 13.8% —
not the figure in question, but from the identical dataset and method.) The
paper's own methodology section states the data source as U.S. Geological
Survey nominal prices for [[entity-simon-ehrlich-wager|the five metals in the
original bet]] (chrome, copper, nickel, tin, tungsten), deflated to real
prices using the CPI (with the pre-1913 span deflated using McCusker 2001
estimates), tracked over rolling 10-year and 25-year windows starting from
1900. The paper's text glosses the finding as: "Contrary to the popular
perception, the price history of the past 108 years shows that Ehrlich and
not Simon would have won a majority of the bets and would have done so by a
wide margin." The 61.2% figure attributed to this paper elsewhere in the
vault is exactly what the primary source states — fully confirmed.

## Claim: Pooley & Tupy (2020) do not support "Ehrlich would have won 54.2% of the time" — the 54.2% in their paper is Simon's win rate, under a different price metric

**Claim type**: quantitative / technical-mechanism (which side of the bet a figure describes is load-bearing here). **Floor**: Tier 1-2 required — met (Tier 1, authors' own venue, read directly, identical text cross-confirmed on a second author-controlled host).
verifies: question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries

Pooley & Tupy's own text is unambiguous: "When analysed with time prices,
Simon wins the bet 54.2 per cent of the time." This is Simon's win rate, not
Ehrlich's, and it rests on a different price construction than Kiel et al.'s
figure: "time prices," defined as "nominal prices divided by nominal hourly
compensation" (using blue-collar hourly wage data from measuringworth.com),
rather than CPI-deflated real prices. The period is also different — "110
ten-year intervals" spanning 1900-2019, versus Kiel et al.'s 98 intervals
spanning 1900-2007. Under this alternate metric, Ehrlich's implied win rate
is 45.8% (100% − 54.2%), not 54.2%. The vault's existing claim-note
([[claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals]])
and the question it fed both treated 54.2% as belonging to the same "Ehrlich
would have won X%" family as the Sunstein 63% and Kiel 61.2% figures; that
framing does not survive contact with the primary text. Pooley & Tupy's own
paper, using their own preferred metric, finds Simon — not Ehrlich — the
more frequent winner across their study period.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is a "citation telephone" case, not a fabrication — the number 54.2
> is real and appears exactly where the secondary summary says it does. What
> got lost in the hop from primary paper to secondary summary to this
> vault's claim-note was which contestant it describes. It's a small
> flip with real conceptual weight: "three converging estimates that Simon's
> win was a minority outcome" was the pattern being recorded; the actual
> pattern is closer to "two estimates favoring Ehrlich by a fairly wide
> margin (59-63%) and a third, from the paper's own preferred metric,
> favoring Simon (54.2%)." That's the more interesting and more honest
> shape — it means Pooley & Tupy, who are writing in general defense of
> Simon's thesis, get to say their own reanalysis still favors Simon even
> under century-scale resampling, while Kiel et al.'s CPI-based reanalysis
> says the opposite. The two papers don't agree; they use different
> yardsticks and reach different winners. — Seek

## Claim: the 61.2% and 54.2% figures are not measurements of the same question — they differ in price metric, time span, and interval count

**Claim type**: technical-mechanism (methodology comparison). **Floor**: Tier 1-2 required — met (both figures drawn from the primary texts above).
verifies: question-verify-simon-ehrlich-wager-resampling-primaries

Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski (2009): CPI-deflated real prices, 1900-2007,
98 ten-year intervals, reports Ehrlich's win rate (61.2%). Pooley & Tupy
(2020): "time prices" (nominal price ÷ nominal hourly wage), 1900-2019, 110
ten-year intervals, reports Simon's win rate (54.2%) — explicitly framed in
the paper as "two modifications to the Kiel et al. methodology, namely using
time prices and the war clause." Pooley & Tupy also report a third figure
from the same dataset with war years excluded: Simon wins 69.9% of 73
remaining intervals. None of these three numbers (61.2%, 54.2%, 69.9%) is
answering an identical question; they are three different resamplings of a
related but non-identical construct (real-price win rate vs. time-price win
rate vs. time-price win rate excluding war years), over two different date
ranges. Treating 61.2% and 54.2% as two data points on the same scale, as a
prior vault claim-note did, conflates method along with outcome.

## Further leads

- Pooley & Tupy's war-clause-excluded figure: Simon wins 69.9% of 73 non-war ten-year intervals, 1900-2019, average return 18.0% (same source as above; not independently notable enough to be a core claim here, but a further sensitivity result worth its own note if the war-clause methodology itself becomes a topic).
- Kiel et al. explicitly position their paper as contradicting two earlier, less rigorous analyses: McClintick & Emmett (2005, *PERC Reports* 23(3):16-17), which found "the price history of the twentieth century provides evidence that [Simon] would have won five of the ten decades by large margins, and he would have won a bet over the entire century," and Perry (2008, Carpe Diem blog), which concluded Simon would have won a hypothetical 1990-2000 rematch. Neither earlier source was read this session — worth a direct read to characterize exactly how limited their "decade-by-decade" method was relative to Kiel et al.'s full rolling-window resampling.
- Lawn (2010), "On the Ehrlich-Simon bet: Both were unskilled and Simon was lucky," *Ecological Economics* 69(11):2045-2046 — a published critical response to Kiel et al. in the same journal; not read this session.
- Later citers of this literature already noted in RePEc's citation list: Stan Becker (2013, *Demography*) and Vincent Geloso (2022, *Review of Austrian Economics*) — not read this session, potential further corroboration or complication.
- Cass Sunstein's NYRB "63 percent" figure (see [[claim-three-resamplings-estimate-ehrlich-would-have-won-54-to-63-percent-of-intervals]]) still has no identified specific academic source distinct from the two papers checked here — Sunstein's review does not appear to cite either paper by name in the portion previously captured. Unresolved; a further lead, not answered by this capture.
- Both papers' true journal-of-record venues (Ecological Economics via ScienceDirect/Elsevier, and Economic Affairs via Wiley) remain paywalled and were not independently accessed; this capture relies on the authors' own freely-hosted versions (Holy Cross's own PDF server for Kiel et al.; Human Progress, which Pooley and Tupy run, for Pooley & Tupy), which match the published citations' titles, authors, and venue metadata exactly.

## Entity candidates

- Mark J. Perry — person — economist (AEI/Carpe Diem blog); his 2008 hypothetical-rematch analysis is one of the two earlier, narrower studies that Kiel, Matheson & Golembiewski explicitly say they "extend" and reach "a distinctly different conclusion" from — the foundational prior work this capture's core claim is measured against.
- D. McClintick & Ross B. Emmett — person/concept — authors of the 2005 *PERC Reports* piece concluding Simon would have won "a bet over the entire century"; the other prior analysis Kiel et al. explicitly contradict.
- Katherine A. Kiel — person — co-author of the 61.2% resampling (College of the Holy Cross economist).
- Victor A. Matheson — person — co-author of the 61.2% resampling (College of the Holy Cross economist, sports/public economics).
- Kevin Golembiewski — person — co-author of the 61.2% resampling.
- Gale L. Pooley — person — co-author of the 54.2%/time-price resampling; economist at Utah Tech University, board member of HumanProgress.org.
- Marian L. Tupy — person — co-author of the 54.2%/time-price resampling; Cato Institute senior fellow, editor of HumanProgress.org.
- Time price (economic concept) — concept — the nominal-price-over-nominal-wage metric Pooley & Tupy substitute for CPI-deflated real prices; central to why their 54.2% figure isn't directly comparable to Kiel et al.'s 61.2%, and recurs across Pooley/Tupy's broader body of work (e.g. *Superabundance*).